On a meeting a few days ago, the Firefox 3 team announced the list of preliminary features. They expect to release the browser on the third quarter of this year.

Here are the features which will most likely reach the final version of the program, according to the author:

• Improved interaction with Add-ons: clearer, more coherent language; less steps to install; more visible way to configure add-ons, probably to be moved back to the general Options window, which I hope deeply; more noticeable alerts when updates are available; a permanent restart Firefox button.
• Support for remote bookmarks, bookmarks and history annotation.
• Files could be handled by web services. If I am reading this correctly, this could mean you would be able to click on an attached document and open it with something like Writely or Google Documents. And perhaps, as I asked Santa, the ability to redirect mailto: links to web email services.
• A much needed print support to prevent cut paragraphs and true WYSIWYG.
• The much requested MSI installer which will be a much welcomed improvement for IT administrators as it will ease deployment and updating of Firefox across a company.
• In the security front: support for Microsoft CardSpace and OpenID (check tomorrow’s article for more coverage on this). Smarter credentials handling.
• Airbag, the Google backed open source crash reporting tool will replace currently licensed TalkBack.

And among the highly desirable requirements:

• A private web browsing mode. I guess this would mean no cache, history, password or entered form information storage.
• Save web pages as PDF files, integrated with history. That would be just awesome.
• Support pause/resume downloads across sessions.
• Make Firefox help accessible only while online. Not sure how good and idea this is.
• Microformats support.

We already talked about Microformats in the past, and I really hope that they make the final release of Firefox 3. And I certainly hope that they improve their download manager somehow.